One rehab journey from surgery is enough for any athlete, but UCD’s Luke McCann is now navigating his second major lay-off in five years, aiming to return to indoor competition next year.
McCann has already staged one remarkable comeback. After undergoing knee surgery for fragmented cartilage in 2019, he returned stronger than ever, setting a five-second personal best in the 1500m with a time of 3:36.81 in 2021.
Since then, his career trajectory has been largely upward.
In 2024, the Dublin native clocked his fastest metric mile at 3:33.66 and qualified for the Olympic Games in Paris after a whirlwind month of racing across Europe.
But just three months after his Olympic debut, McCann faced another setback- requiring surgery to repair a similar, but more severe, cartilage issue in his other knee.
Now, a year post-surgery, the 27-year-old has recently completed a training camp with Athletics Ireland’s National Endurance Group in Font Romeu, France.
While his peers build on summer fitness, McCann is still increasing his running volume, managing 50–60 km per week alongside intense gym and cross-training sessions. His goal: to compete indoors in 2026, ready or not.
“We just need to see how these next few weeks and months go as we gradually up the running training and get back into normality I guess. I hope to have an indoor season of some kind, whether that be good or bad, I just want to be back on the start line I guess,” McCann detailed on Athletics Ireland’s Inside Training series on YouTube.
A key part of his recovery has been strength and conditioning work under the guidance of former 400m runner Martina McCarthy, who competed at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 at just 18 years old.
McCarthy has played a pivotal role in Irish athletics success, working with stars like Cian McPhillips, Ciara Mageean, and Sharlene Mawdsley through Sport Ireland at the National Sports Campus – where McCann has spent much of the past ten months.
“I only started with Martina at the beginning of my rehab journey in maybe February or January of this year. With open knee surgery you lose all the muscle in your quad, your hamstring, your calf almost immediately and then I was 8 weeks non-weight-bearing. So you can imagine if you’re not using your left leg at all for 2 months, you just lose everything in it.
“The first steps of the gym was to just try and bulk up the left side to almost equal the right side again… For the first few weeks it was mainly just basic movements whether it be bodyweight squats or trying to do as much as possible with the pressure cuff.
“We started 2 days a week, that moved quickly into 3 days a week because it was just like that was the only training I could do. I was doing gym before I could do any cross training.
“I was just living in the Sport Ireland campus in the Institute from 9:00 am to 4:30 pm, 3 days a week.”
Luke McCann competed at the Olympics in Paris but went under the surgeon's knife just a few months later
Strength training has become essential for McCann – something he once considered optional.
“I would always just focus on the running aspect of things and think that the gym is like the one percenters. But since I started working with Martina, she really treats it like a third session in the day.
“You really have to be on your A-game. You can’t just be puttering around in here. With the amount of injuries that I’ve had, I’ve found how important the gym actually is to stay injury-free.
“I’m not 18, 19, 20 anymore, so I don’t have that kind of youth on my side where I’m just robust and able to power through different niggles and stuff like that.”
McCann explained that his knee issues are genetic, a diagnosis he never expected after the Olympics and it was either open surgery or a full knee replacement, he chose the latter.
“I think it’s classed as a disease… It’s called osteochondritis desiccans. It’s basically just weak cartilage.
“I had a very similar injury in my right leg in 2020 where a small piece of cartilage just came off. Just literally walking down a set of stairs. At that time they were able to just go in keyhole surgery and take it out, so it was a little bit of a quicker rehab journey in that sense.
“But unfortunately, the same thing happened on the left leg. This time it was a 2x2cm piece… taking the piece out wasn’t really an option. They were saying that I might get 2 or 3 more years out of the knee before potentially needing a knee replacement. That’s not ideal when you’re 26.”
The latest procedure should give McCann another 20 years of knee health. While he’s still managing aches and pains, he jokes that it’s better than retirement.
“Just coming off the Olympics… You think the whole rest of your career is ahead of you. So the only other option was to go in, get surgery and try to put screws through the cartilage and stick it back on and hope that it heals.
“That would buy me almost 20 years of cartilage out of my knee so I could hopefully potentially get a full career out of it. I’m very lucky to come through it quite well. The knee is quite good at the moment.
“Just dealing with some other knock-on effects from it but in the grand scheme of things a stress reaction in the shin is nothing compared to retirement.”
The full Inside Training episode with Luke McCann will be available on the Athletics Ireland Youtube channel from 7PM on Thursday HERE
